August 29, 2014

President Obama’s candid admission “We have no strategy,” also described the situation as the deadline for this week’s column approached. A plethora of topics were under consideration. As we struggled to settle on just one topic for this week’s column we recalled that one San Francisco based columnist used to occasionally resort to a catch-all column style that he called “clear the desk top” and so we decided to pay homage to Art Hoppe by imitating his shtick and sweep a bunch of disparate topics into our Labor Day end of the week roundup.

If the Russians had waited a few more days they could have launched their incursion into the Ukraine on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, which might have gotten them better (and more sympathetic?) play in the world’s media.

We’ve seen news reports that state that the beheading of an American reporter has produced a wipeout for America’s reluctance to send troops back to the Middle East. A news report that cites a source for that conclusion (such as “according to a poll conducted by the New York Times”) is a news story. A vague conclusion (such as “most Americans now think”) is pro-war propaganda.

Has Obama offered to ignore the Russian incursion into the Ukraine in return for being given a free hand for dealing with ISIS forces inside Syria?

Walter Cronkite went to Vietnam to report on the Tet Offensive in early 1968, after his special was broadcast LBJ was reported to have said: “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the war.”

A Viet Cong representative commenting on the conflict said: “It has already lasted for more than twenty years. We can hold out much longer. Eventually the American people will tire of the war, and will turn against it. Then the war will end.”

Can George Bush’s “Forever War” refute that logic or will a new American President have his Cronkite moment?

In the last week of August of 2014, America’s TV audience saw a mother’s emotional plea to spare the life of her child. America’s network pundits predicted that the plea will convince American mothers to be stoical if troops go back to Iraq. Nothing is said on American TV about what a similar affect the thousands of collateral damage deaths of women and children in Iraq and Afghanistan might have on the citizens in those countries.

Is it possible that the American mother’s plea might have an unintended consequence on the ISIS leadership and accelerate their rush to punish the next journalist?

Could America’s lack of bipartisanship eventually disintegrate into a permanent perpetual state of mutual distrust and animosity that will eventually become as fully entrenched in American society as is the Sunni vs. Shiite division is in most countries in the Middle East (or to use a newly revive trendy old word: the Levant)?

In an effort to take the pulse of the USA, we have recently availed our self of an opportunity to wtch some cable TV news. When Megan Kelly talked about Obama going to Rhode Island for some fund-raising, she did a moue and rolled her eyes. It was so adorable but it made us wonder: “If Obama has lost Megan Kelly is the war lost?” and also: What happened to the “fair and balanced” style that ignored any criticism of Dubya when he took more and longer vacations?

If she gets all hot under the collar about that perhaps she needs to take the ice bucket challenge on air?

That, in turn, reminded us that we have been waiting to see next month’s Playmate of the Month dousing some member of management (Hef himself?) as part of this summer’s publicity fad, which would also illustrate the concept of the high school coach’s advice to “take a cold shower!” We fired off an e-mail to a fellow on the Playboy masthead asking how long we were going to have to wait to see photo evidence that that magazine is hip to the bucket challenge.

Our efforts to recall which columnist had used the “clear the desk top” shtick had caused us to do a roll call of the great columnists who had at one time or another called San Francisco their hometown. That list, in turn, convinced us that if the National Society of Newspaper Columnists ever decided to establish a brick and mortar Columnists’ Hall of Fame, it would have to be located in Fog City.

Hunter S. Thompson and Ambrose Bierce are perhaps the best known of a long list of writers who churned out columns while being residents of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Some naysayers might want to nominate the Big Apple as the appropriate location for a hypothetical Columnists’ Hall of Fame and we would reply: “Other than Walter Winchell and Pete Hamill who else has been a famous Manhattan columnist?”

It’s hip in Hollywood to call a telephone “an Ameche,” because Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a film back in the Golden Age.

There is a bar in Frisco called “The Philosophers’ Club” and that caused us to wonder if it would be worth while to open a gin mill (there are a massive amounts of synonyms for the word “tavern”), fill it with photos of famous columnists, and call the bar “The Columnists’ Hall of Fame.”

Smoke filled bars and newsrooms are a thing of the past. Aren’t actors permitted to smoke at work if the scene calls for indoor use of cigarettes (such as shooting a film noir set in the Thirties)? If that is so, what about declaring a watering hole a location shoot for a movie and paying the customers a $1 stipend for working as extras. Maybe students at a local film school could provide a crew that would work for peanuts? (Would they actually do filming for a student documentary project?) Thus they could have one more nostalgia laden nights in a place where extras and the actor playing Sam Spade could light up a Fatima (or other brand) cigarette (wasn’t it hip slang back in the day to call them fags?)?

Speaking of the good old days, the Berkeley Public Library has a copy of John McMillian’s “Beatles vs. Stones” book and we are enjoying it immensely. A concise review will be included in future column.

We saw “Sin City: A Dame to Kill For” this week. It scored high on the 3G meter. Girls, Guns, and fabulous fast cars that require high octane Gasoline are Hollywood’s sure fire formula to please the male audience.

If a columnist, who doesn’t smoke and doesn’t drink, misses smoke filled bars; was it the right move to legislate them out of existence?

We hope that the NRA will step in and get the Uzzi kid (or her parents?) a book deal and some lucrative speaking fees and perhaps a guest appearance on Letterman’s TV show.

CORRECTION: Last week we reported that movie director John Waters had done a book promotion at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. Just as famed San Francisco columnist Herb Caen used to cover goofs, we must quote Ricky Blane’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) line in Casablanca: “Apparently, we were misinformed.” It turns out that Waters and his friends were just visiting the famed tourist destination and where not there to promote Water’s new book “Carsick.”

[Note from the Photo Editor: Has any columnist ever inspired a brand name for a beer?]

Janis Joplin has been quoted as saying: “Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say, ‘The hell with it,’ stay stoned, and have a good time.”

Now the disk jockey will play Jack (Dragnet) Webb singing “Try a little tenderness,” Leonard Nimoy singing “I walk the line,” and William Shatner singing “Rocket Man.” (They are all available on Youtube.) Now we have to fact check the claim that San Francisco’s ten most famous citizens were all fictional characters. Have a “Do I feel lucky?” type week.

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January 6, 2013

Mention the topic of birth control to a group of Catholics and folks leap (knee jerk reaction) to the assumption that the conversation will soon be about abortion, but not this time. While attending a Jesuit University in the early Sixties approving the use of birth control pills was an indication that the student was showing a nasty propensity toward unorthodox thinking and anticipated the need for the expression “get your mind right, Luke.” A comedian (wasn’t George Carlin always the source for all truly funny original thoughts?) back then made the assertion that “Catholics make the best fascists” and thus were used to accepting theological precepts while in the “unquestioning” mode of learning, but for one student who didn’t want to create waves and rock the boat, there were some very disturbing tangential aspects to the birth control debate which led the rogue thinker to question the morality of warfare, which was a very, very convoluted line or reasoning and best left unexpressed in a regimented atmosphere that equated heresy with treason.

At a time when American involvement in the internal affairs of South Vietnam was limited to sending a few advisers to help the South Vietnamese military handle dissent as they saw fit, questioning the morality of warfare was incidental in a segment of society that concentrated on stressing the rationality of using sperm and ovum to play a variation on the game of “Russian Roulette.”

Since college, even at a Jesuit University, is meant to be a time for sharpening one’s intellectual acuity, one particular student in the early Sixties was asking himself obscure questions meant to challenge his ability to analyze and assess regimented thinking. Such as? If one of the Ten Commandments advises folks to not do any killing, how then could the Pope reconcile German Catholics and American Catholics trading bullets, artillery shells, bayonet wounds, and aerial bombardments with each other during WWII?

Shouldn’t the Pope, whom we had been convinced spoke with absolute infallibility, have stepped in and, like a football referee, adjudicated the dispute and saved lives?

How could the Pope reconcile extensive killing from one side of his mouth while simultaneously assuring married couples that the sanctity of life required them to play a high stakes game of chance out the other side of his mouth?

Either life is sacred or not, but to maintain that young couples had to gamble with their future because the lives of their potential progeny were sacred and that once their children reached the age of 18 they were just cannon fodder to be used as counters in a world wide game of Imperial chess isn’t logical.

[We keep hearing PSA sound bytes on the progressive radio station in San Francisco reminding listeners to register with the draft board right after they celebrate their 18th birthday. Are liberals still dispensing advice on how to dodge the draft in Berkeley CA. You must register. It’s the law. Try fact checking this idea.]

Resources for fact checking abounded at a Jesuit University, because teachers of philosophy, logic, and theology were plentiful, but the answer to our question remained tantalizingly elusive. Ultimately we were able to pin down the official stance on war and killing as taught by the Pope and holy mother the church: “A Catholic citizen of any country may, in good conscience, participate in any war fought by his country as long as there is reasonable expectation of victory.”

That explained it. The American Catholics thought that Patton was going to take them all the way to Berlin, and the German Catholics thought that Hitler would quarterback a magnificent goal line stand by his team. No problem.

However, there was one teeny, tiny problem with that vague and nebulous doctrine that was just about totally irrelevant until after graduation. Early on in the American intervention in the affairs of South Vietnam, Americans were reassured that the United States wasn’t going to get bogged down in a long, arduous, and costly (in terms of lives lost) campaign for total victory. The U. S. would fight until things were back under control and then (like the Cheshire cat?) withdraw from the area formerly known as French Indochina.

If the US wasn’t going for victory how long would it be until the priests in the USA unanimously opposed the War in Vietnam on moral grounds?

When the students at UC Berkeley chanted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?,” were they referring to unborn fetuses?

Since we were assessed as having a draft status of 1-Y and since our nomadic existence precluded a chance to take vows and enter into the holy institution of marriage, our obsession with reconciling the birth control question with the problem presented by optional military adventures in foreign lands, was put on hold for a good long while. LBJ explained the lack of involvement with use of the expression: “He doesn’t have a dog in that fight!”

Later in life we became our own source for theological opinion by becoming an ordained minister in the Universal Life Church. (We are still trying to fact check the assertion that all members of the Sixties band, The Rolling Stones, availed themselves of the same opportunity.)

Now that the fiscal cliff has been postponed and the only item of national concern is the perennial debate about guns, we have a chance to sit back, reflect on the past, and polish our omphaloskepsis (a word which baffles Word Spellcheck) skills and revisit some intellectual conundrums from the past.

Did the mavens of pop culture ever conclusively answer the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”?

How the heck did the Japanese Army become the Army of occupation so fast in Vietnam? It sure did provide a convenient launching pad for actions against certain British colonies later in WWII but efforts to consult the history books produce only a gaping gap when a fact checker attempts to find out how the Japanese Army took over so fast in Vietnam.

If austerity budgets become necessary isn’t it logical to conclude that suspending school lunch programs and funding armed guards in every school in the nation, is just a “no brainer”?

What would Ayn Rand advise about cutting Sandy Relief from the budget?

If Secretary of State Cordell Hull was quoted by UPI in a story that ran the last weekend in November of 1941 as saying that Pearl Harbor would be attacked and that war with Japan was inevitable, what would he say about the possible odds for a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program?

Recently we saw a news story that hinted that some poor blighters are still serving a life term in Texas prisons for smoking one joint (i.e. a marijuana cigarette) back in the Sixties.

[Photo editor’s note: A photo taken in December of 1966 showed a lone war protester on Times Square in New York City in blizzard conditions holding a sign saying: “‘I’d rather see America lose face than it immortal soul.’ Norman Thomas” was assessed as being a great shot that generated too much anti-war sympathy and thus turned down for use on the AP wire. Since then it has disappeared without a trace from the World’s Laziest Journalist’s photo archives and we must rely on words without an accompanying graphic to lure some readers to this column.]

Is it too late for an old hippie to get national attention (Does CBS Evening News read the World’s Laziest Journalist?) by burning a fifty year old draft card?

President Lyndon Baines Johnson said: “If we’ve lost Cronkite, we’ve lost the country.” [Back in the Sixties unconditional love in the mainstream media for (Republican) Presidents was unavailable because Fox News had not yet been born.]

Now the disk jockey will play “Alice’s Restaurant Massacre,” “The Ballad of the Green Beret” and “Eve of Destruction.” We have to go write a tepid review of the new movie “Not Fade Away.” Have a “time is on my side” type week.

May 11, 2012

Will this Hughie take you back to 1968?Walter Cronkite reports (via video tape) from Saigon.This poster was ubiquitous in 1968.

The Conservatives’ prayers have been answered and this year’s Presidential Election will ignore jobs, taxes, and wars and concentrate on an emotional wedge issue. On Thursday, May 10, 2012, the top headline on the front page of the New York Times was about the gay marriage issue and it was augmented by a “news analysis” on that very same topic.

Traditionally conservatives have preferred to use a highly charged tangential emotional issue rather than focus on problems that are integral to the lives and livelihoods of the voters.

Last weekend, this columnist went to the Oakland Museum of California to see “The 1968 Project” which is a traveling exhibition focusing on the social, political, and economic events of 1968 because we anticipated that it would provide a convenient frame for a column comparing and contrasting that year with the situation in this election year.

Jobs, fair and equitable taxation and necessary wars are complex issues that can confuse voters. Obviously both Republican and Democratic candidates want to offer the citizens a program that will reduce taxes, increase employment and preserve the peace, but both political parties can not make identical speeches. They have to achieve brand identity and loyalty for their message and their party. If they don’t; elections would seem like a variation on the Ford vs. Chevrolet debate.

Sales representatives (such as the one portrayed in the classical “Death of a Sales Rep” by Arthur Miller [Did you get the memo on the new politically correct title for that play?]) are always told to sell the sizzle and not the steak, so the two parties need an issue that will represent their “sizzle.”

If both Republicans and Democrats agree that taxes for the wealthy must be reduced or completely eliminated, then what’s to stop the voters from using a coin toss to make their choices?

If both parties know that the military industrial complex thrives on war, then the question is not whether to go to war or not; it is which wars can be sold as necessary for the protection of the citizens?

If the TV at night is clogged with ads urging addiction to products produced by the pharmaceutical industry, then wouldn’t it be hypocritical for Republicans or Democrats to denounce a cottage industry that offers an herbal product that promises similar miraculous medial results? Obviously the large companies would not want amateurs cutting into their profit margin anymore than a bootlegger would want his regular customers to spend their money on some locally produced bathtub gin.

During the Roaring Twenties did any American pundit go to a bar in Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, or Australia and ask the locals why their country didn’t outlaw booze?

Were jobs, taxes, and wars important during the Twenties? Was it easier to judge a politician on his stand for or against Prohibition or was it worth the effort to listen to some long and boring debate about the Smoot-Hawley Act? (“They say it could cause a depression!”) What about the Kellogg Briand Treaty and the London Naval Treaty of 1930? (“What do you mean pave the way for a new World War?”)

The Republican strategists love to frame the debate and set the agenda for the Presidential Elections and as Americans celebrate May 11, 2012, as Twilight Zone Day one only has to casually peruse the usual sources for contemporary political opinion to see that the “there you go again” assessment can be applied to the attention being paid to the issue of gay marriage this week.

On Thursday, May 10, 2012, a reconnaissance patrol on the Internets revealed that some gays were urging the Democratic Party to move the location for their National Convention out of North Carolina to somewhere else.

If they are successful in manipulating the Democrats into making such a change of venue, then many of the party’s management staff will be distracted from the Presidential race by the nuts and bolts decisions that will accompany such a maneuver; if they don’t make the change the gay activists will resent the “my way or the highway” attitude implicit in such an example of fascist control over the splinter group. Either way, the President will look bad and the Republican voters will have occasion to celebrate the success of the architect of their campaign strategy.

On Monday, August 5, the opening day of the 1968 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, California Governor St. Ronald Reagan announced his candidacy for the Presidency. Was that a tad late in the primary season to make that announcement?
He had only been governor for two years. Was he rushing things?

Since many pundits are neglecting to point out that the focus on gay marriage would be a textbook perfect example of Republicans hijacking the national political debate, and that brings up another item that is being neglected in the age of meticulously scrupulous (?) punditry. Is there an ulterior motive which would explain the late date for the Republican National Convention this year?

Traditionally the period between the Conventions and the Labor Day weekend, are devoted to resting up from the primary campaign and concocting the specifics of the Presidential Election campaign, but since the Republican Convention is scheduled to begin on August 27 in Tampa Bay, that means that when it is over (presumably) by the end of the week, it will be the start of the Labor Day weekend and the “go for broke” Presidential Campaign.

Many of the journalists in the realm of national politics seem to prefer channeling the spirit of psychics such as Carnac the Magnificent, on election night and tell the audience what the voters were thinking and what it all means.

The World’s Laziest Journalist will buck the trend and offer readers a chance for some do-it-yourself analysis. What if some Republican decides to imitate the 1968 spirit of St. Ronald Reagan and announce on the Monday of the Republican Convention that he (in the spirit of breaking a deadlocked convention) would accept the Party’s nomination?

What if such a late last minute attempt were successful? If the convention ended and someone other than Romney was the Presidential Candidate, wouldn’t that leave the strategists for the Obama campaign in panic mode? Since the campaign would start on Labor Day, they would have just three or four days to reconfigure the President’s game plan for contenting with the new opponent.

After a week full of unexpected developments that has left the Obama team scrambling to reestablish an image of a confident leader who is in control, doesn’t it seem as if such a last minute new Republican Candidate would be well positioned to push the “Obama isn’t in command” meme on the voters?

There will be a surfeit of commentary available on the weekend after Twilight Zone Day full of near hysterical emotional examples of partisan mind-fuck and the World’s Laziest Journalist realizes that we could never add any noteworthy insights to the array that will be offered. We can, however, try to add a dash of uniqueness by asking about any ulterior motivation there might be for the long (smoke and mirrors) lull between the last primary election in June and the Convention which will fill the news hole during the last week in August.

This week has had other topics to distract voters such as the possibility of a new banking crisis, the controversial Time magazine cover photo, continued Occupy protests such as the looming confrontation between protesters and the University of California Berkeley administration, and the possibility of a change of venue for the Democratic National Convention, but it is very likely that the gay marriage issue will get the undivided attention of most pundits this weekend.

If the Republicans produce an unanticipated candidate in late August, could the confusion that would cause be compared to the consternation produced by the Tet Offensive?

[Note from the photographer: many museums have a rule against using flash. If you have to use available light, be sure to use something (such as a doorway) to brace the camera for the long exposure and take several shots.]

Walter Lippmann allegedly said: “Brains, you know, are suspect in the Republican Party.”

Now the disk jockey will play Pink Floyd’s “The Wall Album” for those folks who can’t get to San Francisco the night this column is posted (for their version of “Call to the Wall”), the Doors’ “The Doors” album, and the “Wild in the Streets” soundtrack album (from 1968). We have to go register for the draft. Have a “girls say ‘yes’ to guys who say ‘no’” type week.